This weekend, at Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct, we showed the exciting future for players and game creators - dozens of new games, a new 1 TB Series S console and new ways for players to get their games anywhere with PC Game Pass coming to NVIDIA GeForce NOW later this year. After our double feature, Head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox Creator Experience, Sarah Bond, Head of Xbox Game Studios, Matt Booty, and Game Director at Bethesda Game Studios, Todd Howard also addressed the future of gaming at Microsoft in our What's Next for Gaming event.

Players are discovering and playing games like never before - we have reached new records for monthly active users and monthly active devices, and just last quarter we saw a 46% increase year over year in people playing PC games on Game Pass. Game Pass continues to grow - our revenue from subscriptions overall reached nearly $1 billion last quarter. We're excited about the future of Xbox, and we see the opportunity to grow not only our own business, but the entire industry as a whole - through creating groundbreaking new games, inviting creators to build their dream projects on our platform, and opening gaming up to everyone, no matter where they are in the world. These are our key pillars to help continue that growth.
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(PR) EA Sports Introduces F1 World Centralized Multiplayer Hub for F1 23
F1 ️ World, a new feature for F1 ️23, with a lot to offer as an exciting new way to enjoy the game, serving as a central hub for multiple game modes. You can also watch a video from Maxime MXM to know more about F1 ️ World (below). Here's what the new hub features:

Series
Designed to offer a range of competitive events that take you on a single player global tour of F1 ️, spanning a variety of game modes and tracks, with primary and secondary objectives to complete.
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(PR) Forza Motorsport Coming on October 10
Today at the Xbox Games Showcase we revealed that Forza Motorsport is coming to Xbox Series X|S consoles, Windows 10 and 11 PCs via the Microsoft Store and Steam, and Xbox Game Pass for console, PC and Cloud Gaming (Beta) on October 10, 2023. We also shared more details on Forza Motorsport's cover cars. The stunning 2023 No.01 Cadillac Racing V-Series.R racecar and 2024 Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray will be available for fans to drive in Forza Motorsport at release.

The Forza Motorsport community is fueled by its passion for competition. We can't wait for you all to experience these innovative and ultra-modern cars from General Motors in our game. In addition to this closer look at Forza Motorsport's cover cars, we also revealed our latest trailer during the Xbox Games Showcase, which was captured in-game on PC.
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(PR) Debian 12 Bookworm Released
After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm). bookworm will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.

Following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware, we have introduced a new archive area making it possible to separate non-free firmware from the other non-free packages:
  • non-free-firmware
  • Most non-free firmware packages have been moved from non-free to non-free-firmware. This separation makes it possible to build a variety of official installation images.

Debian 12 bookworm ships with several desktop environments, such as:
  • Gnome 43,
  • KDE Plasma 5.27,
  • LXDE 11,
  • LXQt 1.2.0,
  • MATE 1.26,
  • Xfce 4.18


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(PR) ASUS ProArt Creator Hub Wins Prestigious iF Design Award 2023
ASUS is today honored to announce that the ProArt Creator Hub app has received a prestigious iF Design Award 2023 in the Apps/Software category of the Communications discipline. The iF Design Award is a globally recognized symbol of outstanding product design.

ProArt Creator Hub - the winner of a 2022 Red Dot Award in the Brands & Communication Design - Digital Solution category - is designed to expose users to the unique features and functions of their ProArt products. It's flexible and can be easily customized to the creator's needs, so they can quickly reap all the benefits with minimum effort. ProArt Creator Hub is included with all compatible ASUS products at no extra cost. The app provides a unified experience across all connected ProArt or ASUS creator devices, so creators can easily calibrate colors, adjust creative parameters and settings, monitor device performance, and optimize their workflows.
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GIGABYTE RTX 4090 WindForce V2 Unveiled, with Unique Tail-ended Power Connector
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4090 WindForce V2 may not be the company's most premium RTX 4090 custom-design graphics card, but it has arguably the best power connector design. Almost every custom RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 comes with a design where in the PCB is half or two-thirds the length of the card, and the remainder of the length is dedicated to the cooling solution, where the heatsink can extend along the thickness of the card. In case of the RTX 4090 WindForce V2, this extended portion of the cooler is recessed by half, exposing the tail end of the PCB. The 16-pin 12VHPWR power input is pointed toward the tail-end, rather than toward the top of the card.

This makes cabling very convenient, as it no longer needs to bend nearly 180° as it emerges from the back of your motherboard tray. The power cable goes straight into the connector with no bending up to a roughly 8 cm length, before making a 90° turn to the back of your motherboard tray, reducing mechanical strain on the connector. Even the NVIDIA-designed adapter included with the card (the one that converts 4x 8-pin to a 12VHPWR), should look neater. It's likely that as a WindForce-series product, this card offers the lowest tier of factory overclocks by GIGABYTE. You still get dual-BIOS, which lets you toggle between this factory-OC, and a Silent BIOS that runs the card at reference speeds, with tighter fan tuning. The selling point, however, is its unique power connector design.

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(PR) Intel XeSS Now Supported in Over 50 Games
Intel Arc graphics have dedicated AI hardware built-in. Leveraging those capabilities for gaming gets the most performance possible out of Arc GPUs, and that's exactly what Xe Super Sampling does. Let's look closer: when you turn on XeSS, every frame the GPU renders starts at a lower size than your target resolution. That smaller image renders quickly, then XeSS steps in. XeSS uses a trained AI model combined with motion vectors and frame history to intelligently upscale frames to full HD, 1440p, or 4K. Got all that? The sausage-making can get pretty technical, but the important thing is turning XeSS on scales games to high resolutions faster than traditional rendering could.

FPS numbers aren't the only thing we're increasing: over fifty games now include XeSS, from the biggest franchises to your niche favorites. When we launched the Intel Arc A750 and A770, we showed how XeSS works to boost FPS in nine popular games with over a dozen more on the way. Now with our high-performance desktop GPUs out for half a year, our game developer friends have helped deliver even more AI-fueled upscaling to over fifty new and existing games. A full list of every game and demo with XeSS included is at the bottom of this article.
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